Monday, February 23, 2009

LibraryThing--yippee!

I've been waiting for this section since I first heard about LibraryThing. I think it will be extremely helpful with reader's advisory and finding new titles for book displays. I'm also hoping LT will help me manage my ever-growing lists of books I'm dying to read and books I've read and loved. Here's the link to my catalog http://www.librarything.com/catalog/memo413.

Step 10: fun with image generators



I did this in no time on spiffytext.com. The hardest part was deciding which of the many fonts and hundreds of backgrounds to use. this will get a lot of use for signs and displays. I did have to save the image to our hard drive and then use the image button.

Step 9: RSS feeds

Without a doubt I found Technorati the easiest of these indexes to use and the search tool on Bloglines the most disappointing --either I'm not using the right search terms (although I tried several) or they just didn't have many matches. Topix was interesting for what seemed the most complete list of media feeds, including local media! I've subscribed to several RSS feeds, including one from TCCL and a crime and mystery fiction blog named Wheredunnit.

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Step 7: Technology and the library

I started with the library 26 years ago and am constatntly amazed at the changes and improvements to our services due to technology. At that time each branch had a basic collection of reference books for general questions and try as we might to answer each question, every day we had to refer several customers to Central or one of the Regionals. Then wonder of wonders we got fax machines and we were so excited. We could have articles and photocopied materials sent from larger libraries in no time at all. And then came Internet access and more on-line reference sources than we could hold in our building! With lots of practice and training we now manage to answer most questions while the customer is here and rarely have to ask them to drive to another location. I cna hardly wait to find out what's coming next.
I keep reading that learning new things is important for maintaining the health of our brains. If that's true, we librarians have little to worry about on that front.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Another thing I learned about Picasa

Okay, I clicked on the link to my beautiful picture of York Cathedral and this photo of a baseball player for a New York team came on my screen. The next time it was a picture of a stained glass window, and then a photo of someone named York. So...I asked my tech guru Sue, who explained. "This is called a dynamic link. Since my original search was for keywords "york england" when I click on the link it takes me to one of the many results of that search--not just my chosen picture.

Monday, February 9, 2009

Fun with Picasa

Oops, I hit enter too soon. Guess I've been having too much fun with Picasa--can't wait to load it on my home computer. I can see how useful tags will be for both personal and library photos. One of the hard parts about organizing photos has always been deciding on the catagory for each picture, but with tags each picture can be found in many catagories. I did a search for photos in one of my favorite places (York, England) and found this photo of the hotel where I stayed next door to the Cathedral. http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/view?q=york%20england&psc=G&filter=1#5139923169805706498

I had a "I've walked on that sidewalk!" moment.